How Can I Promote Open Source On The Macintosh?

Chris Buskirk asks: "I have been working with Macs most of my life. I have since expanded my view to Unix, and Linix. I also do NT for Pain and Profit. I have been a part of the Slashdot community for the past year now, and I have become convinced that open source is the best way to produce software. This week open-source software advocate Eric S. Raymond kicked off the 15th annual MacHack conference. Mac Week is covering the keynote address , and almost all of the responce to the article is negative. Surprisingly this is a departure from the recent mood among the Mac community which has been changing with the advent of OSX. So the question becomes, How do I convince a Mac geek to become an Open Source Mac geek?" I hope that OSX is the spark to ignite the fires of Open Source on the Mac. Or at least bring it the visibility it deserves.

" Most people view Mac users as idiots. There has always been a constant myth that there are no programs for the Mac. However I dispute that claim as I have always been able to get any type of program I have wanted for the Mac, and usually for free. The Mac has always had a large and talented freeware/shareware communtiy, and I would think that this community would be very prone to embrace the open source movement. Once this base of programmers is secured, I would think larger companies would start to follow suit to one degree or another."

Comments

Do it yourself...

[drudd]

I've always thought the best way of promoting open-source software was to create it and release it.

If you do this successfully, it demonstrates the viability of open-source software on your platform. It also gives weight to your advocacy of the open-source model, since you are willing to put forth considerable effort towards that end.

Doug

Development Costs?

[linuxonceleron]

Are there any free development environments for MacOS? If someone is going to develop a program to give away, I can see why they wouldn't want to shell out $500 for VC++ or CodeWarrior. If there was a port of gcc to MacOS (there may be, I'm not sure), there still would be the lack of a good IDE to develop with. A project like Kdevelop for macintosh would provide the ease of use and incentives that the Mac programmer would need to start writing open source.

Re:Development Costs?

[gwernol]

Are there any free development environments for MacOS?

Apple's MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop) is a command-line based development environment that can be downloaded for free from Apple here. MPW is a very UNIX-like environment and includes C and C++ compilers, as well as linkers, assemblers and editors etc.

If someone is going to develop a program to give away, I can see why they wouldn't want to shell out $500 for VC++ or CodeWarrior.

VC++ no longer supports Macintosh development, I believe, so its not a viable option anyway. There is a low-cost version of CodeWarrior available, which can be used for non-commercial (i.e. Open Source freeware) development. Check out the Metrowerks site for details (its currently down, though).

If there was a port of gcc to MacOS (there may be, I'm not sure),

Mac OS X comes with a complete gcc-based development environment, but you currently need to have a (paid) membership in the Apple Developer Program to get it. However, a public beta is due later this summer, and it should be very cheap or free to get the OS with development tools then.

there still would be the lack of a good IDE to develop with. A project like Kdevelop for macintosh would provide the ease of use and incentives that the Mac programmer would need to start writing open source.

Defintely check out MPW, particularly if you are coming from a UNIX background.

Am I trolling, or am I serious?

[AtariDatacenter]

I thought popped into my head. It seems flamish, but I still consider the question to be valid.

Since the financial reward of Mac programming is generally (yes, a generality) less than that of Windows programming, wouldn't the barrier to adopting open source for the Mac be far less than the IBM world? (But maybe more than the UNIX/Linux world?)

Re:Let's say you're right... what does it mean?

[cshotton]

Let's say that you're correct, and that in general, there is far more money to be made in Mac software. Does this even more so raise the barier of entry to open source software on the Mac?

This has always been my theory on why there is so little Mac open source. Specifically, if you've invested the time and effort to learn to program a Mac, the ease with which you can obtain a commanding marketshare makes it quite tempting to take any and every piece of Mac software commercial.

I wrote the MacHTTP web server in my spare time in early 1993. It was originally given away for free and most of the source code was easily obtained as well. But as time went on, the increasing demands on my time, the addition of significant features, and the market demand for the software made it a certainty that the product would become commercial.

After a year of free distribution, it became a shareware product (the first "commercial" web server on the Internet). After a year, the product was making over $250,000 a quarter as shareware and turning it into a commercial product (WebSTAR) was a no-brainer. StarNine turned that into a $15M run rate and 98% market share in 6 months.

From the perspective of even the most altruistic of developers, passing up that kind of cash is hard. In the context of the Mac marketplace, where good software is rewarded with high margins, high purchase rates, and loyal users, it's impossible to pass up. I think all the really good Mac programmers are just too busy making money at it to do open source justice on the Mac platform.